Advertisement

Advertisement

BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

The play X will have you clock-watching – but in a good way

The eternity of space: Jessica Raine as Gilda in X

Manuel Harlan

By Stewart Pringle

They’re a long way from home – 7.5 billion kilometres away, give or take. They’re on a research base clinging to the dark ice of Pluto, waiting to be picked up. They’ve been waiting a long time. It’s hard to say just how long.

Alistair McDowall has made his name with intelligent theatre that smashes genre clichés and reassembles them into a real and bleeding world. His first play, BrilliantAdventures, saw a working time machine become the centre of a grubby street-gang squabble in a run-down Middlesbrough flat. CaptainAmazing told the story of a depressed, divorced father who might just be a superhero. The 2014 smash hit Pomona took on sex trafficking, applying a hint of Lovecraftian horror to its portrayal of virulent misogyny.

X, which opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre on 30 March, is McDowall’s most ambitious work yet. It is a deeply human story of life and loss played out across unthinkable distances, and raises harrowing questions about the limits of cognition and the structural weaknesses of the human mind.

Advertisement

At its simplest, X is a glorious tribute to sci-fi-horror cinema. Its vision of space travel as menial and workaday echoes Ridley Scott’s Alien, its haunted-house beats call to mind the underrated Event Horizon, and its mind-bending sleight-of-hand narrative hints at Solaris and, more recently, Moon.

There are nods to Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, countless dystopian dramas and more than a few episodes of Doctor Who. But where X succeeds is in its ability to structure these well-worn influences into a very different kind of story. And in doing so, it brings our airier science-fiction fantasies down to Earth with a sickening, gut-punching thump.

Mysterious events

Strange things are afoot on the Pluto base. A figure has been seen in the shadows outside the darkened porthole, and the large glowing clock in the centre of Merle Hensel’s dirty-white set glitches and skips when it’s not being watched.

Days are stretching into weeks as the cold dwarf planet takes lazy orbits around its dim sun. The life-support systems could keep running forever, but the crew is beginning to fail. Carefree crew-member Mattie is maintaining a sense of routine through regular masturbation, but the tense second-in-command Gilda, played with a brittle intensity by Jessica Raine, is buckling under the strain.

The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant theorised that time, like space, was a priori: it exists independent of our perception of it. But in an unknowably hostile environment scrubbed clean of external reference points, Kant’s assurances ring decidedly hollow. It’s eternity in here. You could go mad.

Manuel Harlan

One of the play’s recurrent themes is that mathematics – and algebra in particular – is not really our friend. Maths can be unearthed from ancient civilisations, as hard and undeniable as a splinter of pottery. That is what makes it sacred. It is also precisely what makes maths horrible: it goes where we can’t. It handles centuries as easily as it handles hours, and navigates between planets as easily as it crosses oceans.

And we can’t. We are physical beings who operate at a certain scale. Our smallness in a very big universe is truly an a priori condition: it is not up for negotiation. We have ambitions, of course. Looking to space for our next adventure, we’re already beginning to think of ourselves as explorers on those terms. And as we press on with that impossible dream, our defeats can only become more evident, and more tragic.

Time and decay are at the centre of X. These astronauts are a lot like office workers, watching the clock as it refuses to budge and steals their days, steals their time away from their lovers and children until the best of it has run out entirely.

What is X?

The letter X stands for many things in McDowall’s play. It is time, in the equations nervous metrologist Cole uses to keep a grip on reality. It is part of the chromosomal inheritance we pass on to the next generation. It is the crossing out of dying neurons in a degenerating brain. Its equivalence is what makes it so frightening. As things begin to fall apart in the hallucinatory second act, it creeps meme-like into language itself, erasing as it goes: “X X X X X.”

Huge numbers, vast distances, logarithmic multiplication and replication are our enemies, hiding inside us. They are not part of us, and they have nothing to do with how a human consciousness actually navigates time and space. They are the Outside, worming its way in. Our attempts to tame them seem like nothing but wordplay against the death of synaptic networks as dementia bites, or the replication of cancer cells twist vine-like around our bones.

This consistently witty, fleet-footed and thematically formidable play has been given a piano-wire-taut production from the Royal Court’s artistic director, Vicky Featherstone. Like all of McDowall’s work, it functions incredibly well on the level of pure, theatrically audacious genre entertainment, but has plenty to say about the world too.

It broods on parenthood and inheritance, on labour and dehumanisation. It’s out of this world, and at the same time couldn’t be more precisely focused. Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” is seen all the clearer from the cold, dark distance of this Pluto.

X by Alistair McDowall runs until 7 May at the Royal Court Theatre, London